Booking from October 2026Two projects at a time—that's the whole shop
I'm Josh. I move WordPress sites onto EmDash, an Astro-native CMS that runs on Cloudflare's edge. Your content, your URLs and your theme's look come with you. The plugin update treadmill does not. Seventeen years of shipping, most recently as a principal engineer, and you talk to me, because I'm the one writing the code.
No discovery call, no sales deck. A real reply from me, within one business day.
What actually changes when you move off WordPress, and what it costs you to find out I am wrong.
0plugins to keep patched after migration
WordPress sites rot because every plugin is someone else's release schedule and someone else's CVE. EmDash is one dependency tree you own, deployed from your repo, so the patching you inherit is yours and small.
Live in production: chicagoganghistory.com~190 msTTFB to bravada.comfus.io, warm, measured from Singapore
Static where it can be, dynamic where it must be, running on Cloudflare's network instead of a PHP host in one region. Fast from everywhere, and cheap enough that hosting stops being a line item worth discussing.
Measured on bravada.comfus.ioGPL-3.0on the Bravada port, because the theme it came from is GPL and a port inherits that
Open source top to bottom, committed to your repository, deployed to your Cloudflare account. No proprietary CMS licence, no per-seat pricing, no vendor who can raise your rent. If you fire me on a Friday, it still deploys on Monday.
github.com/vhscom/emdash-theme-bravada17 yrsshipping software; 123 tutorials published in public
No account manager relaying your requirements into a ticket, no junior learning TypeScript on your budget, no handoff between the person who sold it and the person who builds it. Ten years at senior, then principal, and the same pair of hands does your migration. The trade-off is capacity, which is why the availability date at the top of this page is real.
vhs.codeberg.pageLinks, not adjectives. They come this early because they are the part worth reading.
A WordPress site I used to run on hardened Kubernetes, now migrated onto EmDash and serving from the edge. Same content, same URLs, no wp-admin. I maintained the WordPress build before I replaced it, so the before-and-after is one person's work.
The Bravada WordPress theme, ported to Astro and EmDash. GPL-3.0, inherited from the original, which is how theme ports work. This is what one looks like finished: same design language, none of the PHP.
An auth reference implementation for Cloudflare Workers—Hono, Turso, PBKDF2, dual-token JWT sessions. Written to be read. It's the repo people star, which tells you where my head is on security.
A 2017 loader that inlines CSS and JS with fetch, in about a kilobyte. Hyperdrive, the WordPress plugin that wraps it, is mine too: I tuned WordPress from the inside before I started moving people off it. The star count is Libraries.io's record, not my own tally.
A Svelte + Headless UI starter that other people build on. Boring, maintained, and still getting stars years after I wrote it.
123 published tutorials on engineering, security and tooling, going back years. The fastest way to find out how I think before you pay me to think.
The Helm chart and Ansible that ran the hardened WordPress before the migration. Proof that "get off WordPress" is advice from someone who operated it in production, not someone who never learned it.
No client quotes here yet. I could write four of them and sign each one "CTO, SaaS company"—you would know, and so would I.
So instead: the work is above, the code is public, and my name is on all of it. If you want to talk to someone who has hired me, ask in the form and I will put you in touch directly, before you commit to anything.
Counts checked 15 August 2026. The star totals above span seventeen years and two forges: most of the older work was published under a GitHub account that no longer exists, and the mirrors at github.com/vhscom hold only what was republished after the move to Codeberg. Every card here links to something you can open today.
I would rather lose the enquiry today than lose your third month. The second list matters more than the first.
Blog, publication, documentation, portfolio, brochure site. Posts, pages, media, categories, redirects. This is the case I have done end to end and can quote with confidence.
Everything ships to your GitHub and your Cloudflare account. You can read every line, fork it, or hand it to someone else. That is the default, not an upgrade.
Founders, solo operators, small teams, one technical person with a budget. My whole cost advantage comes from not attending your steering meetings.
I work from UTC+7, mostly async, in writing. Calls happen when they are genuinely faster, which is not as often as it is made out to be.
EmDash isn't there and I won't pretend otherwise to win the job. If your revenue runs through WordPress checkout or gated membership tiers, staying put is the correct answer and I'll say so in the first reply.
I'm one person taking two projects at a time. If the deadline needs a team, an agency is the right call, and I'm happy to name a couple I'd trust.
I do engineering. I'll build the thing, make it fast, and wire the analytics if you want them. I won't run your funnel, write your ad copy, or promise you rankings.
There will be cheaper quotes, and some of them will be fine. If price is the deciding variable, we'll both save time by finding that out today.
You shouldn't have to sit through a call to find out whether you can afford me. Every band below is a starting point; the fixed number lands in your written scope.
$1,500One week
Fixed. Credited in full against the migration if you go ahead. Hire me and the audit was free.
Before anyone commits to a migration, find out what's actually in the site. I crawl it, inventory the content, work out which plugins have a real replacement and which don't, and write you a plan with a fixed price on the end of it.
$8,000–$18,0002–6 weeks
Fixed price, set by the audit, not an hourly estimate that grows. A tidy site with plugins that have real replacements sits at the bottom of that range. Large content sets, custom post types and plugins with nothing to port to sit at the top. The audit tells you which before you commit.
The whole move. Content, media, URLs and your theme's look carried across to an Astro-native CMS on Cloudflare's edge, with the old site live until the moment you switch.
from $4,0002–3 weeks
Depends mostly on how many templates and how much JavaScript the original hides.
You like how your site looks and hate what it runs on. I rebuild the theme for Astro and EmDash, pixel-close, and can release it publicly if you want, under whatever licence the original obliges.
from $600/moOngoing
Month to month. Cancel whenever; I'd rather you didn't need it.
Optional, and genuinely optional—the whole pitch is that an edge-native site doesn't need much. For teams who would rather someone else held the pager.
Fixed-fee where the work can be specified, day rate where it can't. No retainers you can't cancel, no minimum term, no invoice for the time it takes to write your scope.
None of it should surprise you. That is the point.
What I'll do, what it costs, what I won't do, and what could make the number move. You read it before you pay anything, and you keep it either way.
Days 1–4Your GitHub, your Cloudflare account, a preview URL you can open any morning. Commits you can read. No big reveal at the end, because a big reveal is where budgets go to die.
Weeks 1–4The old site stays live until the new one passes: redirects mapped, feeds intact, nothing 404ing. We flip DNS when it's dull, not when it's due.
Launch dayEverything on your accounts, a written runbook, and a walkthrough recorded so the next person doesn't have to ask me. Keep me on, or don't—both are normal.
At launchThe most common reason a good enquiry never gets sent is not knowing what it sets off. So here is the whole sequence, before you type anything.
Something like CF-4B21A9E0. Your message is written to a database I run, not posted to a form service. Quote the code in any follow-up and I can find the thread immediately.
Written by me, from my own mailbox. josh@comfus.io only forwards, so watch for a reply from an address you won't recognise. Not an autoresponder, not a calendar link, not "a member of the team will be in touch". Usually questions, sometimes an immediate "this isn't a fit, here's who I'd ask".
What I'd build, what it costs, what I'd leave alone. It's a real deliverable and it takes me most of a day. Take it to another developer if you want a second quote. That's a legitimate use of it.
You are not added to a list. If you go quiet, I send exactly one note two weeks later, and then nothing ever again. Silence from you is an answer and I'll treat it as one.
Haven't heard from me in two business days? Something ate it. Email josh@comfus.io directly and quote your reference code.
Three required fields. No account, no funnel, no obligation. Just a direct line to the person who would do the work. "Our WordPress site is slow and I'm scared of the update button" is a complete and useful first message.